Opening Windows

Walls between work and life have broken down. Companies have not noticed.

Work and leisure used to be quite distinct once upon a time (and that wasn't so long ago either). Work was carried out at designated hours in the workplace, with tools that the employer provided; home was spouses, kids and paid vacations. Even where you carried work home, it usually meant a temporary exile to the kitchen table. Once, only artists and rockstars lived without such boundaries.

This, of course, is long gone. Laptops and telecommuting started the blurring process a couple of decades ago, but things really went south with the advent of  the smartphone. Uniforms gave way to business formals, yielded to business casuals before finally jumping off the roof entirely when the flip-flopped dotcommers took over. Work texts were shoved between bites of dinner, treadmills served as venues for conference calls, angry birds flirted with corporate emails and social networking finally nailed all those coffins firmly shut.

That's the new reality. Work and life have been smashed into tiny, tiny bits, then tossed all together into the bhelpuri of "worklife" (we dont even bother with the hyphen any longer). People have been taking work home for years – today's real change is the invasion of home into work. Family photos on the desk have been swamped in a flood of bermudas, bean bags and BYOD, and with this has come a new thinking – that of cooperation rather than control. Homes rarely run well purely on command - even Von Trapp was finally unable to stop the singing – and managing in those situations requires different approaches.

Managements, even those thoroughly progressive American ones, are still mostly conceptualised around command and control. Company policies are imperative "this is what you must do" statements – social cooperation plays no role in enforcement. They're enforced by coercive prevention, and suffer horribly when the control required to implement the coercion isn't present.

Security is possibly the first casualty of this lack of control. Out in the open, we're re-learning to secure by social means rather than authoritarian. What used to be simple take on new complications. Consider an employee who is about leave the company, and corporate data needs to be removed from his personal smartphone. The phone device is personal, company contacts mingled with private ones, communication a jumble of work tweets and kardasshian posts – what exactly is owned by the company and can be forcibly wiped?

Most people avoid stealing because they think it is wrong – not because everything is locked up (its not). In most societies this soft sanction works quite well, some locking up, some arresting but mostly cooperation and just the occasional theft. Companies, however, shudder to do security in this way – and it may not even be legally possible. Can a company trust employees to voluntarily wipe corporate data off their smartphones when they leave? Probably - its quite likely that the vast majority of employees will not betray this trust but can that prevent lawsuits and liability in those rare cases of misuse?

I don't know if the invasion of homestyle cooking is better than the earlier management model; it is, however, an inevitable side-effect of this blurring of boundaries. Feudalism used to do fine till democracy came along and changed a lot of the furniture - expect something similar to happen in workplaces.